For a party that continually accuses the Congress of a leadership crisis, it is a measure of the BJP’s own bankruptcy in that department that they should have no better leader than Narendra Modi to lead them in 2014. Read more

Contrary to what some politicians say, I do not believe the Sangh Parivar’s latest stress on Hindutva is a nine-day wonder that will disappear with the Kumbh Mela. I have reason to be convinced that it is a clever, well thought out strategy and that those who are propagating it know even as they call for the Ram temple in Ayodhya that the temple issue is a self-defeating goal. Read more

Noticed a little but not much commented upon earlier this year was the fact that for the first time in a decade or more, the BJP had lost its Ayodhya seat in the Uttar Pradesh assembly. Now the party has lost a graduates’ seat from the Konkan which it had held for 40 years in the Maharashtra Legislative Council. Read more

Nagpur, Maharashtra’s winter capital, was ever a season of intrigues. Governments have been rather wary of holding the winter session of the legislature in Nagpur (which has just concluded this season) because more often than not it leads to a shake-up of some sort or the other, fells governments or at least puts one or the other chief minister in the dock. Read more